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Laurie King is not, as regular followers of this blog will know, a writer who outlines her books before she begins them. Some people call this being a pantser (as in, by the seat of her…) but I refer to it as Organic, as opposed to the Organized outliner.

(In our writing manual Crime and Thriller Writing, my more Organized co-author and I came up with these terms after starting with more, shall we say, judgmental labels. I had to admit that there’s no point in alienating the outliners by calling them “anal”.)

At any rate, my brain doesn’t work by planning out a story before it starts. I’ll sometimes list a sequence of events, to keep an upcoming section in order, but when it gets more than a chapter or two into the future, I feel the fog descend, the blindfold tighten.

That means, the rewrite is where the novel is actually written. A first draft is a short, meandering, half-developed heap of paper that no one but an experienced editor can make any sense out of. Its main job, for writers like me, is to lay out the machinery of the plot, to set its unadorned and largely meaningless pieces in order and make sure that the events and people mesh. The rewrite is when that….okay, call it an outline, even though it’s a 300-page one—is turned from a list of events involving half-developed characters into a full-blooded narrative with people we care about.

Again, some writers produce a first draft by throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, the cleaning supplies beneath it, and the dirty dishes waiting to go into the dishwasher. I write a sparse first draft. The oft-given rule of “Cut every third word” would leave me with short stories. Instead, my second draft puts on maybe thirty percent of its original length, for a final version of 400-450 pages.

But I do cut. And often, it hurts to put stuff into the Cuts folder. Clever asides, interesting speculations, material that develops a back-story… chop.

I do always go back through that Cuts folder, to make sure there’s nothing there that’s really too good, too illuminating, too intriguing to leave out. And I almost never find anything worth fighting to find a place for.

Every so often, I have a battle with my editor over cutting material. Sometimes I hold out, and make only the briefest of compromises. Other times I let them take the argument, because really, was Stephen King’s The Stand a better book once he succeeded in getting its massive cuts put back in? I sure didn’t think so. Sometimes editors are right.

But it also means I occasionally have material that can go into the supplemental pages. I don’t know that I’ll have much from my Riviera Gold Cuts folder—certainly nothing like the vastly whittled-down Testimony that got pulled out of The Language of Bees (which, if you haven’t seen, is the second link here)—but it’s possible.

But if I end up with a scene where Russell dances the Charleston and I have to cut it, I promise to put it on the book’s page. Just for you guys.

The artist said it was hard to choose one of the Russell stories, but in the end he was so taken by the secret exit from Mycroft’s flat, that he worked The Language of Bees into it–see it just above “The Greek Interpreter”?

The map comes from the Literary Gift Company, here. It also has these great mugs–

But honestly? I wish I had a newborn in the family so I’d have an excuse to get this onesie:

This is the final Tuesday of our Twenty Weeks of Buzz, and (appropriately) continues last week’s post concerning the nineteenth novel. However, I shall be putting up a bonus post next week on The God of the Hive, entitled, “Writing a god into being.” You might want to read the book first…

The first Russell and Holmes novels took place largely within the British Isles, and then mostly within England.

Beginning with O Jerusalem, however, the duo are as apt to be outside of England as within: Palestine, India, San Francisco (twice, as Holmes gets his own story-within-a-story in the otherwise Martinelli tale The Art of Detection) with hints of Japan and a future adventure. But England awaits, and I decided that after three books elsewhere, it was time to send them home again, if nothing else than to care for the bees that have been Holmes’ avocation since Conan Doyle retired him around the time of Victoria’s death.

But how to make The Language of Bees, my ninth Russell and Holmes, new and enticing—for its author if no one else? What would keep her eye on the story and her fingers on the keyboard? After more than a million words about them, what new things could I say about these two people?

Over the course of eight books, the Russell stories have developed any number of links. Knowing, for example, that I wanted to set a book in what was in 1919 called Palestine, I left unfinished the chapter in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice where the two go to that British protectorate. Instead of detail, that chapter functioned as a brief outline of their experiences, because I intended to return (in O Jerusalem) not only for a closer look at the time and place, but for an interesting shift to a previous stage in their relationship. In turn, O Jerusalem hints at the British nature of a pair of apparent Bedouins, setting the stage for those two Bedu to turn up in Sussex for Justice Hall.

If nothing else, these unfinished threads give reviewers a chance to prove how closely they have read the book: a murderous falling balcony in The Game (book seven) is not resolved until the following Locked Rooms (book eight,) which brought delight to critics of The Game who jumped on my dangling plot points.

But mostly, I write these unfinished scraps with a vague intent of providing myself with an intriguing situation to explore in the future—not that I have much idea how, just that there is something in that raw bit of place, person, or idea that holds promise.

Thus, way back in the second book in the series, I set the scene for The Language of Bees ten years later: In A Monstrous Regiment of Women, Russell makes mention of Sherlock Holmes’ son:

…something in his hands reminded me of Holmes, and of Holmes’ lovely, lost son.

And later, when Russell is trying to convince Holmes to help a troubled young Army officer:

“And if he were your son? Would you not want someone to try?”

It was a dirty blow, low and unscrupulous and quite unforgivably wicked.

Because, you see, he did have a son once, and someone had tried.

So, with this setup, I could have my characters return to Sussex but, rather than find themselves in a situation they had been in before, be suddenly confronted with a radical departure: Sherlock Holmes as a father.

One of the drawbacks of writing a series, especially for those of us writers who have a low threshold for boredom, is that die-hard Fans want essentially the same book but with new trappings. After all, they fell in love with a group of characters and a situation, and they don’t really want huge changes, any more than a person desires huge changes in the person he or she married.

However, not all of us are equipped to be a Sue Grafton or Lee Child, those blessed writers who positively enjoy working within a closely confined palette of settings, characters, and times. Some of us get to book four or five and begin to eye the characters who are now riding our backs, and contemplate acts of nasty violence—there’s a good reason why Arthur Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes off a high cliff. I have no doubt he came to regret not providing the grieving Watson with a corpse, laid in a nice Victorian coffin, its lid securely nailed shut.

Over the years, I have got around the problems inherent in writing the same characters in two ways: First off, I tend to alternate my writing, shifting from the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes historical series either into the contemporary Kate Martinelli procedurals, or into a standalone, which has me spending a year in another world entirely. Either way, I return to the continuing Russell saga with clear eyes and a genuine interest in what has been going on in their lives while I was busy elsewhere.

The other way I’ve escaped serial tedium (and remember, the reader may take pleasure in a yearly voyage in the company of familiar characters, but the writer has to take that voyage using a close-up, slow-motion, continuously-replaying camera focused on Every. Tiny. Step. Along. The. Way.) has been to throw something new into each book. The Martinelli novels tend to have a main character who doesn’t reappear in others, or if so, just briefly. The Russells tend to travel.

Russell and Holmes meet, as the first line of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice puts it, when both she and the century are fifteen: “…fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.” Sussex, London, Wales, Dartmoor—the first books are tightly British as she grows to maturity as a person and as a detective, and they find their variety in the contrast of bustling urban streets and bleak moorland loneliness.

The Language of Bees ended with those three dread words, To Be Continued, sparking an outrage that has not been seen since Conan Doyle “killed” Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. It is perhaps appropriate, then, to end this post with that same notice:

There are as many styles of writing as there are writers—and I don’t mean the words on the page; I mean how they get there.
I have writer friends who work set hours, every day without fail, year around, as if they were clocking in at a warehouse or office. I know others who take a similar approach with number of words rather than time spent. And a lot of writers swear that the only way to work is to start the next book on the heels of the finished one.
Me? My brain compartmentalizes, so it’s no surprise that my life is lived in chunks of intense concentration. When I have a first draft going, staring at the laptop’s screen is pretty much all I do for three months. Mail goes unanswered, dust mice become dust bunnies, appointments go unmade.
And then I finish the first draft, raise my head, and dive into a flurry of activity with broom, pen, telephone. I see friends, work my way through the stack of unanswered letters, call the contractor and the doctor and the guy who keeps the watering system in order.
And then the rewrite presses in on me, and I vanish again, not to be seen until the manuscript is ready to be sent off.
Right now, I’m in the post-copyedit stage, with the only solid piece of work coming at me: the galley proof pages, which will arrive at the end of the month. Which means that everything I’ve put off since, well, last year this time is standing at attention, six inches from my face, demanding that I Do Something About It.
My To Do list has turned to a second page, although I’m happy to say that most of the demands on the first page have lines through them—not that I’ve done them, you understand, but it means that the clogged gutters have moved from a note with a phone number to a note on the calendar, along with the gardener, the dentist, the thyroid doctor, the veterinarian, and a dozen other Real Life entities.
Central in this flurry of activity is a consideration of what we—I and my trusty e-world compatriots—want to do for next spring’s publication of The God of the Hive. Last year, we did “Fifteen Weeks of Bees” to link the anniversary of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice with The Language of Bees. In 2010, we’ve decided that since The God of the Hive is my twentieth book (good heavens!) we’ll do—ready for it?—“Twenty Weeks of Buzz.”
The planning and preparation of blogs and contests and all the fun stuff will no doubt take up every spare moment until I pick up my laptop again to write the new book, with luck in January. At which time I will disappear into the ether, and only be heard from in echoes of months past.
And now if you’ll pardon me, it’s eight o’clock and I have another line of my To Do list to cross off: a telephone call to the artist who did Russellscape #1 for The Language of Bees, for a conversation about doing a similar piece for The God of the Hive. Green Man images, anyone?

I’m over at the blog for Kepler’s bookstore this week,The Well Read Donkey, talking about beginnings, middles, and ends.While you’re there, maybe you could even click onto the Kepler’s link and buy a book? Hooray for indies!

And I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Perseid meteors are doing their thing right now, although you probably will need to wait until dark to see them.There’s a map, even, with the SF Chronicle article.Although the article doesn’t mention what happened during this time in 1924—for that you’ll have to read The Language of Bees.

And in case you were wondering, yes, the title contest is now closed.Please stop sending names.Please.Stop.

As for other Good Causes, I apologize again for the delays and problems some of you have had with the Heifer International prizes that came (or, should have come) with your donations during the Fifteen Weeks. If you have not yet received them, please let me know in a comment here, and I’ll see what I can do. Those of you who donated more recently for the Holmes booklet, if you live in the US, you should have them, although overseas addresses are somewhat delayed.

This is the booklet, a very pretty publication from Heifer International collecting Sherlock Holmes’ remarks about beekeeping that appear in The Language of Bees. (signed, not by Holmes alas, but by me.) It’s a fundraiser for the Heifer beehive project, and if you want one (or several) you can donate online, or send me $10 per booklet (checks are fine) at PO Box 1152, Freedom, CA, 95019.

They sent me a whole box of these lovely things, and I’d really appreciate the chance to transfer some of them from my house to yours.

A trio of tidbits.First, Mary Russell has learned how to post photographs on Twitter.That lady, 109 years old and she’s ahead of me.

Next, there is a new LRK interview for your ears to enjoy, with the delightful Barbara Gray in Cincinnati, here.

And last, if you have yet to buy that man in your life a Father’s Day present, I will mention that Barnes and Noble has put The Language of Bees on their Father’s Day display table.Which I thought seemed a little odd until I realized the book is, indeed, about fathers and sons.Other stuff, too, of course.

Hey Brits, on the first of September, you’ll have your very own Language of Bees–and shortly thereafter, a tour:

That’s right, the pub date is 1 September, and although we’re setting up events now, I can say that I’ll be at the Reading Festival of Crime on Sept 12, talking about Murder in Mind with Sophie Hannah, Steven Booth, Jane Hill and R J Ellory.

If you are a librarian, or you would like to suggest a library for me to do an event, post a comment with their information and we’ll have the publishers add them to the list being considered.